Watches or Smartwatches for Tripping?

Does anyone use an Apple Watch or a Garmin Watch (or something else) on trips? I normally wear an Apple Watch Ultra (which I used for fitness paddling over the winter) but it doesn't really seem to have the battery for long trips, and the maps are fairly iffy.

I'm thinking about one of the newer Garmin smartwatches as a replacement for multi-day overnights. It seems like they'd have better battery by a large margin and maybe better maps... but I'm also worried I'll spend the whole trip head down in the GPS.

I've previously worn a mechanical watch but the lack of alarms for getting up before sunrise is a bit of an issue. What are people doing for this?

I take a phone if I'd ever want to set an alarm but it hasn't happened yet. (only reason that I can think to do so would be to see if I can catch a northern lights display but I usually awaken during the night anyway)

For me, part of unplugging on a trip is not caring what time the rest of the world thinks it is... Eat when hungry, sleep when tired & return to the car when I run out of map.

(your mileage may certainly vary and there's nothing wrong with that)

Definitely getting too focused on my technology is a concern. I'm already spending a lot of time looking through a camera and maybe don't really need another screen.

I wear a Garmin 265s daily. I like it a lot. I do a fair amount of running and it's nice for that. When using it purely as a watch it lasts a couple weeks before charging. With the GPS on for intermittent activities I usually end up charging it every week or so. It wouldn't take much of a battery bank to keep it charged up for a 30 day trip.

I haven't done any trips in the last few years so I can't comment on how it would perform. I would definitely bring it along on a trip though. I like having a watch and a watch that tracks steps, heart rate, and calories burned would be interesting.

I would have no interest in using it, or a larger version, for maps and GPS tracking. I'm still a paper map guy and think that's part of the fun.

Alan

Gamma1214 said:

For me, part of unplugging on a trip is not caring what time the rest of the world thinks it is... Eat when hungry, sleep when tired & return to the car when I run out of map.

Click to expand...

I'm sure I could get by just fine without a watch but I like having one because it helps me estimate travel times. If I know I've covered 9 miles in the last x hours then I can use that to determine if I can make it 6 miles to next camp site or if I should stop here for the night. I find this more helpful on "non standard" days such as paddling with/against the wind, lots of small lakes/portages, rivers with a mix of runable rapids and portages, and, especially, traveling upstream on rivers.

I'll sometimes set an alarm to make sure I get up early if I think I need to beat the wind.

Alan

My $25 Casio watch with a dial face is the perfect tripping watch. It is waterproof, has a 10 year battery, I won't cry if I lose it...
unlike the person that owned the $400 GPS watch that I found at the canoe launch last week. It's at the Cromwell Police Station in Connecticut if it is yours.
I played with it some to see if it had the owners name (it didn't) - that is saved on the owners smartphone, which it has to be paired with to be of much use other than recording basic data that you can get from a map.
A pretty expensive gadget considering that it only does stuff that is kind of fun to do on your own (like Alan said above).

I think a Casio with an alarm might set you back $50 or so.

I don't own a smart watch and never will.

For mapping while tripping, I use a Garmin GPS mounted on the thwart in front of me with street, topo, satellite, and ocean coastal maps, along with tide charts, loaded into it. Trying to read such maps off a screen as small as a watch face seems like elevating techno-gadget obsession over practical functionality. If I keep the GPS on all the time, it lasts about 40 hours on two lithium AA batteries. It also has an alarm clock. As does my phone.

Speaking of phones, I haven't worn my decades-old Timex for many years because my phone displays time. However, when I was camping in a place in the Adirondacks last summer that had no cell service, I got worried that the clock app wouldn't work. But it does, as long as one has battery power. Phones have an internal quartz clock, and if they have a GPS, the time can be updated via satellite even when not within cell coverage.

Nevertheless, I've taken to wearing the trusty, old analog Timex whenever I go canoeing. As John Cameron Swayze said on Times TV commercials from the 1950s through the early 80s: "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking." Except maybe with elephant stomps.

We will make camp when "the sun gets to about here."

I bring my iphone and my InReach. InReach gets us weather, verifies paper map orienteering, keeps the wife happy, and is priceless in a bind. Phone gives us tunes, a camera, and an alarm clock. Phone has managed to find some bars in some pretty unexpected places that were life savers. The InReach should have an alarm clock feature - that would make sense. I need an alarm - I would love to roll out of the tent whenever it suits, but that would be the day after the day after and we would have another reason to be notoriously behind schedule.